Tag: 2D animation

Well, one work in progress to be honest. A project I’ve been giving the working title ‘Rube Goldberg’ over the last two years I’ve been researching and working on it.

It’s a strange feeling for me to realise that I’ve been working on this since 2015. It’s the longest I’ve ever dedicated to a project.

But in all honesty, that’s because I only worked on it in my free time. And I never intended for it to become an actual animation. It started out as an idea for an online interactive display, somewhat like the original idea for my Infomaze (that now only exists as a demo video, the site having crashed long ago). I made these little morphing animations specifically for that purpose, before I realised that I really wanted to make a proper animation.

I’m glad I did, the thought alone of having to figure out the coding again was not something I was looking forward too!

I’ve now finally moved into production, but it will still take a while before it’s finished. I’ve learned a lot during my research and in making the many, many little tests I’ve posted on this blog, but I’ll still be learning a ton more. Here’s hoping I manage to get it done by the end of this year!

My personal projects have screeched to a standstill over the last few months, and only now have I been picking up the pace. There’s not much to show yet, but hopefully soon I will have some new renders to show off. In the meanwhile, the films I make at work are an incredibly rewarding experience, as I get to experiment and try out new formats.

The two films I want to show off here are a film made for STOWA, (Foundation for Applied Water Research) and a film made for the Province of Overijssel.

STOWA was drawn by hand, using pen and ink on paper. The drawings were scanned, cleaned up, and then coloured digitally. Animation was mostly done in After Effects, with a few exceptions done in a traditional frame-by-frame animation. The film itself is about how certain diagnostic factors are being used to determine the health of bodies of water, so the style is based on old topographical maps and drawings found in geography and geology textbooks.

Omgevingsvisie Overijssel is meant to inform people about procedures used by the Province to determine the placement things like wind turbines, new neighborhoods, and business parks, which is reflected in the film’s style by showing these items being sketched onto the landscape itself, and using a crayon-like style for the lines. The animated parts are a mix of rotoscoping, traditional frame-by-frame animation, and animation in After Effects.

Today I held a presentation at my old academy about what I did after finishing my study. I held it together with a good friend of mine – Abe Borst (http://squabe.nl/) – and it was a lot of fun. I made some animated slides to go with it, and here are a few of them:

Two months ago, I took on a job as animator/motion designer at Beeldtaal Filmmakers in Deventer, and I’ve been incredibly busy since then. I haven’t been able to work on the Rube Goldberg machine very much, so that’ll be something I’ll pick up again in the summer, when the pressure goes down and our clients go on holiday. In the meantime, here’s a film I made with Beeldtaal for the 2017 Hanse Convention in Kampen. It was shown today at the opening: